TRAVEL AND LIFESTYLE DIARIES

For my Cuba blog entries, I am about 70% through. My Cuba trip last May was an around-Cuba-trip starting with Havana (north), going down to the south, then to the west, and finally the east. The eastern part of Cuba will be blogged soon. At this point of the travel, and for this particular blog entry, we are now located in the western part and are staying at a 4-star beach resort, Hotel Tryp Cayo Coco , a hotel in the Cuban keys that hasn’t been updated since the rise of the Castro regime. It is our last day in Cayo Coco and we are preparing for our next destination: Viñales The distance between Cayo Coco and Vinales is 680 kilometres, roughly 8 hours and 50 minutes as advised on Googlemaps. See here our road trip itinerary: Cuba Road trip Ideally, we would have taken a stop-over in between. In our earlier trips around Cuba, we usually drive a maximum of 4 hours before we call it a day and stay at the place we stop. But because we are running out of days for this holiday and we c...

So Blondine and I had some mojitos and we sighted some flamingos and a peacock and peahen courtship, we also went to check out the beach. We were told that it rained earlier in the afternoon, in fact we could still see pools of water all over the resort, but hey, the beach still looked very lovely. The sand was so fine, it reminds me of the beaches in the Philippines. We took pictures of ourselves of course. As it was late in the afternoon we didn’t change into swimwear anymore. We are not beach nuts really. We’ll just chill at the lobby café with some cocktails. There were 4 restaurants located in the resort and for each of these restaurants you are required to reserve at least a day in advance. We were craving for some Cuban Creole cuisine so we asked the guy at the reception if he could help us. He did some calls and told us that we have seats available at the Creole restaurant. Thank you! Happy, we went back to our table at the lobby and continued drinking our mojitos. ...

It’s been snowing here in the Netherlands since Monday. It’s white outside now. Tonight and tomorrow as well there is forecast of snow: 10-15 cm. During days like these I prefer to stay indoors and have a warm cup of something or a glass of red. But I also like to look back at the warm holidays I had earlier this year. Speaking of which, let me go back to my Cuba trip last May with Blondine. Yes, I am far from over Cuba! The last entry I wrote was our arrival at the strip that connects mainland Cuba to the cayo’s (keys or islands). We will be going to Cayo Coco and we will be staying at the 4-star beach resort, ‘Hotel Tryp Cayo Coco’ . This beach resort has definitely seen better days. I am guessing, the 1950's and 1960's. Building maintenance in Cuba is a known problem. I was quite glad that we were only staying here for a 1-night lay-over! We will spend a night’s lay over here and tomorrow before lunch we will be driving up north to the direction of Hav...

When you are driving for longer hours you need some caffeine to keep awake and concentrate on the road. So we decided its about time for another stopover, and this time we want to take some of the famous Cuban espresso. We found this roadside ‘comida’ restaurant and they are selling Cuban coffee for CUC$1. Probably one of the best roadside coffee I will ever have. Strong, pure and just soooo good. Done with the coffee (so little in a big glass) and we have 2 more hours to go to reach the keys! Then we finally reached the causeway to Cayo Coco. This reminds me of the causeway to Marken (Netherlands) . Now this man-made causeway linking mainland Cuba to the Cayos (keys) is approximately 27 kilometres long. The whole thing is so cool considering that Cuba is a relatively poor country, they still managed to build this up. We are almost there! Travel Period: May 2012 Destination: Cayo Coco (Ciego de Avila), Cuba Keep in touch and follow me on Facebook: Travel & ...